Carrie Preston, professor of English and women’s, gender, & sexuality studies at Boston University, opens the Keough-Naughton Institute's spring 2024 speaker series with a lecture titled "Ulysses, Movement, and the Origins of Critical Displacement Studies."
James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), the story of a day’s journey through Dublin, is also a meditation on the human right to movement with gestures of concern for migrants and cultural minorities. Preston reads Ulysses in relation to the emerging, interdisciplinary field of critical displacement studies, and as a text that anticipates the failings of the current refugee regime that turns human mobility into crisis.
Speaker Biography
Carrie Preston is a professor of English and women’s, gender, & sexuality studies, and the founding associate director of the Center on Forced Displacement at Boston University. She is the author of Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, & Solo Performance (Oxford UP 2011), which won the De la Torre Bueno award in dance studies, and Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, & Journeys in Teaching (Columbia UP 2016), a finalist for the Modernist Studies Book Prize. She has published articles on modernism, performance, and critical race, gender, and displacement studies. Her forthcoming book, Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Theaters of Racial Justice, is a critical examination of audience participation and the role of the ally in theaters and other institutions.